Electricity film review – Agyness Deyn stars in the gritty adaptation of Ray Robinson’s novel

An unusual reaction to seeing your dead mother and begging a doctor not to change your medication are two of the scenes that Agyness Deyn nails in Electricity. She plays Lilly, an epileptic twenty-year old who has had a tough upbringing. That’s not tough in the sense of social services deciding to take her away from her mother. Rather it is tough in the sense that her mother phoned social services and asked for her to be taken away. Her mother also caused Lilly’s life-long epilepsy by throwing her down the stairs when she was two.

The mother’s death brings Lilly back in contact with her poker-playing geezer of a brother Barry, who is keen to sell the family home in an unidentified town in the North and share the proceeds between the two of them.

There is a problem with this plan – there is a third sibling, the disturbed Mikey. Whilst Barry is somehow jetting off to Las Vegas and leaving spare first class tickets on mantelpieces in case Lilly changes her mind about joining him, Lilly heads to London. She searches for Mikey, soon finding her youthful inexperience and generosity being taken advantage of. Another of the film’s somehows is Lilly’s very large current account balance. Presumably it comes from the house sale, but it must have been sold, contracts exchanged and monies deposited in absolute record time.

The film’s focus on an epilepsy sufferer is where it is most acute. Not the visuals of the fits which bring soft focus and intense colours, but the day to day portrayal of a life that includes moments of memory loss that can last days and is dependent on pills. Deyn helps us understand Lilly’s fear that the doctor will take her meds away or change her prescription – an added stress in a life with problems enough.

The search for Mikey is a more usual series of lucky coincidences, whilst the two brothers are roughly drawn, one a wide boy, one a violent psychopath. Subsidiary characters are strangely helpful and forgiving but Agyness Deyn is superb as the fragile Lilly, trying to live a very difficult life in very difficult circumstance.

Verdict: See